On the opposite wall, straight across from where I stood, was a long bookshelf. Its shelves were almost completely filled with black binders. Without saying a word, I crossed the room. Behind me, I heard the clink of glasses, followed by the sound of the wine being poured. I ran my fingers along a row of binders, randomly reading the printed labels on their spines.
CATHERINE ANNE BRADY—VOL. 1
MARÍA ELENA RUIZ—VOL. 4
AMANDA MICHELLE JORDAN—VOL. 5A
Marc arrived at my side. He handed me a half-full glass of ruby dark wine. “To you,” he said quietly, touching his glass lightly against mine. My eyes went to his face, back to the rows of binders, and then back to him. I couldn’t think of a response, so I shrugged a sort of offhand acknowledgment and took a sip. Actually, it wasn’t just a sip … it was more like a serious swallow. The effect was instant—a taste that was at once rich and dense and exotic. I felt a rush in my head, and for a second I thought he had drugged the wine. I must have taken an audible breath, because he set down his glass and rolled a chair over to me.
I sat. My mind was a turmoil wrapped in cotton.
He pulled up the other chair and sat beside me. He took a sip from his glass and said, “So, what do you think?”
“About what?”
“Start with the wine.”
I felt my nostrils flare. The man was exasperating, and I wasn’t ready to admit that I was already hooked. I replied by fluttering a hand at the rows of binders. “Does CID know about this?”
“No. But it’s all photocopies. I created a mirror file of the entire investigation.”
“You had photocopiers back then?”
“Yes, indeed.” He flashed a smile. “And cars, and Quarter Pounders, and a lot of people even had indoor plumbing.”
I ignored the remark and homed in. “That’s a lot of three-ring binders. That’s a lot of photocopying.”
“Forty-one four-inch binders, to be exact. And they’re not three-ring. They’re Lever Arch.”
“Lever what?”
“Lever Arch binders. It’s a European two-ring design, finger-touch opening. I like them better than the ones we use over here. So will you.”
“You assume a lot.”
“Yes, I do. You and I are going to solve this case. You just need to believe it.”
My eyes lasered into his. “Marc, you’re not a cop anymore!” I was so intent on cross-examining him, I didn’t notice that I’d addressed him by his first name.
“As far as I’m concerned, this is still my file. Nobody’s bothered to look at the case in over twenty years. Nobody but me.”
“They’re bothering now! Terry Snead says CID is all over it!” His expression darkened, and I was reminded of his views on Lipinski. Views I shared. Views this man somehow knew I shared. I decided to change tack. “There were eight girls missing, but you left only six dental charts at the morgue.”
“Ina and María were Cuban refugees. Their families didn’t have the money to pay dentists.”
“‘Ina and María’? It’s become that personal?”
“Nobody else has been looking for them, Claire. I’m their only friend.” His jaw tightened. “Especially Mandy’s.”
“Amanda Jordan?”
He nodded.
“Why her?”
His eyes filled with sudden emotion. “Because I knew her.”
I thought of the smiling girl in the photograph in the file, and the remains of her petite body laid out on the cadaver lift in the morgue. I started imagining the horrors she must have endured. I suppressed the train of thought and took another swallow of wine.
Marc blinked dampness from his eyes. He said, “This isn’t really the way you’re supposed to drink this stuff, but what the hell…,” and took a slug from his own glass.
I upended my glass and drained it. “So much for sipping and savoring a noble grape,” I said, handing him the empty glass. “May I have some more?”
He stared at me for a second, and then he started to laugh.
It was a wonderful laugh.
He went to retrieve the bottle. We’d been sitting at the worktable, so I took advantage of his momentary absence to roll my chair a few feet along to the spread of photographs I’d seen when I entered the room. I picked one off the top of the nearest pile. It was an establishing shot, showing an area of broken vegetation and the stumps of freshly felled trees cut off almost flush with the ground. A shallow excavation could be seen in the center of the photo. The next picture was taken from the edge of the excavation. Intertwined human skeletons lay clearly exposed, in situ, at the bottom of the hole. Close-up shots followed, one featuring a distinctive ring on a skeletal finger—the ring I had seen in Terry Snead’s office. Several more featured tiny anomalous bone fragments in Jane Doe’s pelvic region.
These had to be the Forensic Crime Unit’s photographs of the grave site next to the Bronson highway project.
Marc returned to my side, carrying refilled glasses.
I looked up at him reproachfully. “How did you get these?”
“I still know people. I kept in touch.”
“It’s been thirty years! There can’t be anyone left at the Forensic Unit who was there when you were on CID!”
“There are still a few retired guys around. After twenty or thirty years struggling to pay off the mortgage, they tend to stay put.”
Marc pulled his chair over to mine while I flipped through the rest of the photos. Other than replying to my occasional question, he said nothing and left me to it. Along with the recent shots taken at the grave site, there were eight groups of photographs, some in black-and-white, each collection clipped together and labeled with the abductee’s name. Each started with a copy of the victim’s photograph from her missing person file and went on to show, in stages, her point of departure (apartment, dormitory room, shop premises, hotel room, etc.), her known or presumed route on foot, and, incongruously, the destination she never reached, including a photograph of Constance Byrne’s mother’s home in Cedar Key.
When I was halfway through the last group—the Amanda Jordan photos—I stopped, puzzled. I flipped back to one I had just examined. It showed a paved sidewalk, a narrow grass verge, then the concrete curb and part of the asphalt-paved street. In the upper center of the photograph, in the middle distance, an unidentifiable object could be seen on the edge of the sidewalk.
The next shot was taken from a position much closer to the object. I could see it was a roll of something, possibly a carpet, seen mostly end-on, so its length was difficult to estimate.
The next shot was the one that had sent me back to the earlier photos. It showed a roll of carpet, about five feet in length and eight or ten inches in diameter, lying partly on the sidewalk and partly on the grass verge.
Later photos showed the same roll of carpet, taken from different angles.
I asked Marc, “What’s the point of this?”
“Amanda would have walked along this sidewalk on her way to that bridal shower. It’s where I believe she was taken.”
“Why?”
“At the time, it was just a hunch I had. I decided to test it by bringing in a tracking dog. We used some clothing from the laundry hamper in Mandy’s bedroom. We started the dog from the front door of her house. The track ended on the grass there”—he pointed to a mark on one of the photos—“just a few feet from the carpet roll. The dog reached that spot and just sat down and whined. Just to be sure, we ran the track again with a different dog. It led us to the same spot, sat down, and whined. It was eerie.” He sipped from his glass. His mind seemed to drift off for a second. “You remember Ted Bundy.” It wasn’t a question.
I felt a chill. “Yes.”
“Bundy would sometimes pretend to be disabled. He’d have his arm in a sling, or he’d use crutches, and persuade the victim to help him load something into his car. Something heavy, like a box of books.”
“Or maybe … a roll of carpet.”
“That’s right. But we know
this wasn’t Bundy. He was already in jail, and he didn’t start describing his abduction techniques to the FBI investigators until years later.”
“So what’s your theory?”
“My theory is that if great minds think alike, maybe sick ones do, too.”
12
Hours later, the wine bottle was empty, the remains of our ordered-in pizza were congealing in the box over on the desk, and I was in the end stages of a running audit of the contents of the forty-one binders. After we finished the pizza, Marc had left me alone to concentrate. He checked in from time to time to bring me water and to answer questions, but mostly he stayed downstairs and out of the way. I took my bathroom breaks in the en suite, discovering a spectacular sanctuary featuring an antique claw-foot tub.
I had been only skimming the binders, trying to get an overview. Marc had been right—the Lever Arch files were easier to work with than the ones I was used to. But the reams of written material they contained had offered no real surprises.
Naturally, there were no autopsy reports. With one exception, there were no lab reports, since no one had ever pinpointed an exact location for any of the abductions. In Amanda Jordan’s case, the area around the carpet roll had yielded virtually nothing of evidential value. A hair and fiber analysis of the carpet itself came up empty, revealing only that it was a recently manufactured area rug. The manufacturer’s label was intact, leading the investigators to a company in Missouri. Based on the lot number, the company was able to tell them the month of manufacture—October 1977—but, critically, not where the carpet had been shipped. It could have been sent to any one of fifty-seven retail outlets spread across the eastern half of the United States. Detective Marc Hastings had determined that a flooring company in Ocala, forty miles south of Gainesville, carried product from that particular manufacturer, but when he showed a color photograph of the carpet to the purchasing manager, he was told that the firm had never ordered from that particular line.
I came across a mostly unhelpful offender profile in the Patricia Chapman volumes. It had been prepared by the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit a few weeks after her disappearance. The report’s conclusion (“… white male, 20–25 years, above average IQ, likely raised by either a single parent, probably a mother, or by alcoholic parents or guardians, likely sexually or physically abused from an early age, etc.”) was so generic that it could have applied to half a million men in the state of Florida alone. The report had been written several years before the creation of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, later made famous by the writings of a few retired profilers. I thought the predicted age range of the offender seemed a bit amateurish. With these sorts of crimes, the basic rule—as I had learned it—stated that the analysis should start at a notional age of twenty-five and then add or subtract years depending on the sophistication of the crimes. When this report was written, the unknown abductor had already struck four times in just under nine months without leaving a single witness or a shred of physical evidence. I would have put the age range much higher. But then, who was I? Just a seven-year lawyer.
Teams of detectives had canvassed all the known or projected routes of each victim’s walk from home to workplace, or from workplace to parked car, or from home to social engagement. Roadways, footpaths, parks, and landfills were combed again and again. The homes of known sex offenders were searched—sometimes repeatedly, sometimes without a warrant. Not a shred of usable evidence was uncovered, nor was a single witness identified who recalled seeing the victim interacting with a potential abductor. Only in the cases of the first and third victims—Ina Castaño and Catherine Brady—did anyone recollect seeing the young woman during her final journey. In each of those cases, the victim was said to be unaccompanied and apparently in good spirits. Despite an advertising campaign, no one came forward claiming to have seen Constance Byrne hitchhiking on Route 24. In the case of Victoria Chan, a grad student from the College of Engineering told the police that he had passed “a Chinese girl, or maybe Vietnamese” when he was running the Alice Lake loop. Other than establishing that the young woman was still alive and unmolested at that approximate time and location, the man’s statement provided no leads. Just to be safe, the investigators had run a complete background on him and cleared him as a possible suspect.
The investigators’ continuation reports were arranged chronologically through each section of the binders. A tally of the investigators’ names revealed fluctuating numbers, with the size of the teams expanding immediately after a disappearance—with the exception of the first two, when no one in authority seemed to be paying attention. After the journalist disappeared, the ranks assigned to what was by then a federal, state, and local task force swelled to more than twenty-five investigators. Despite the increasing effort, the mass of paper generated amounted to no more than a chronicle of investigative failure. There was a seemingly endless supply of leads that went nowhere or that led only to the clearance of unrelated crimes. There were pages and pages of anonymous tips sent over from the local police hotline—evidentiary will-o’-the-wisps that, out of desperation, had been doggedly pursued to their predictable conclusions, wasting precious investigative resources. As the list of missing women lengthened and the investigation continued to marinate in unrelenting failure, I felt the frustrations of the detectives seeping off the pages of their reports. Prominent among the later report writers was Marc himself, who had worked his way up from the missing persons squad after the second disappearance to a position on the local task force after the Christmas Eve disappearance of Patricia Chapman.
I was sitting at the desk, absorbed in one of the Amanda Jordan binders, when I heard Marc enter. It was a few seconds before I realized he wasn’t moving. I lifted my head and caught him standing just inside the door, holding a coffee mug and watching me. There was something in his eyes … almost a look of longing, as if I reminded him of someone. Someone he had cared for deeply. The instant passed, veiled by his quick smile. He stepped to the desk and set down the mug.
“Black, no sugar.”
I pushed back from the desk. “Thanks. Maybe I shouldn’t. It’ll keep me awake.”
“I thought you were going for an all-nighter.”
Startled, I checked my watch. It was after one in the morning. “Hell, I have to work tomorrow!”
“You can sleep in the guest room if you don’t feel like driving.”
I thought about the look I’d seen in his eyes a few moments earlier. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Suit yourself.” If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it.
The aroma of the coffee enticed me. “Maybe a few sips,” I said, and reached for the mug.
Marc rolled his chair over and sat across from me. He checked the label on the binder. “You’ve covered a lot of ground.”
“Just scanning. I see thousands of words, but not many facts.” I leaned forward. “Tell me the truth, Marc. I’m a seven-year lawyer. I have no deep experience in conducting criminal investigations, just criticizing them, which hasn’t made me a lot of friends in the police. Why are you so sure I’m the one who can break this case?”
He thought for a moment. “Call it instinct. I’ve watched you … in court. You’re good. You’re thorough. And you’re tough.”
I eyed him. “I’ve seen you in my courtroom exactly once. There’s something you’re not telling me. Something important.”
His silence told me I was right.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“Something you need to discover for yourself.”
The man was exasperating. I flared. I waved a hand, taking in the room. “One word from me, and CID takes all this away! You know that, don’t you?”
His facial expression shut down, closing me out. “That’s up to you,” he said stiffly. He got up from his chair and left the room.
13
Court was in session, and I was hating every minute of it.
Specifically, I despised the judge. He was
tall and bony, with a narrow face, long nose, and a pair of small eyes embedded like raisins below his bushy eyebrows. He swept into his courtroom like a comic opera grandee, wearing his robe, a pair of god-awful oxblood dress shoes shined to a mirror finish, and a perpetually sour expression. Of course, his appearance would have been irrelevant had he been a man of evenness and courtesy. Regrettably, he was not. His angular presence came complete with an oversized affection for his own intellect. To some degree, that may have been the result of his election to the bench at a relatively young age, encouraging him to believe his own campaign propaganda. Whatever the reason, according to his haggard and much-harassed clerk, any reversal of his judgments invariably elicited a braying rehearsal of foulmouthed invective against “those pygmies squatting on the Court of Appeals.”
Altogether, His Honor Judge Theodore P. Barlow was a thoroughly dislikable man.
But … the fact remained that, whatever the reasons behind the man’s acerbic disposition, he was the judge and I was the lowly prosecuting attorney. I was obliged to veil my true opinion of the arrogant bastard behind the polite rituals of courtroom courtesy.
Today’s hearing had been another example of Barlow’s infamous dawn raids. We had convened at eight o’clock sharp. The judge took perverted pleasure in imposing early morning starts on attorneys—no doubt so he could ruin their days before they even got started.
I sat at the counsel table with Tracy Collins, our office’s visibly confused young intern, studiously concealing my thoughts. Behind my bland expression, I was able to enjoy at least a moment of immature satisfaction. Because of me, Barlow was sitting straight-backed on his dais, presenting the packed courtroom with a spectacle of undisguised judicial rage.
At the other table, a rat-faced defense attorney from Live Oak named Morris Pascoe was whispering to a pockmarked lug in an orange jumpsuit. His client had beaten his own brother half to death with a crystal vase. Fortunately for the victim, the vase hadn’t shattered. Unfortunately for him, he’d sustained a fractured skull and two cracked vertebrae in his neck.
Time of Departure Page 7
